Posted on 11/17/2011 1:11:42 PM PST by Cardhu
Scientists say they can now explain the existence of what are perhaps Earth's most extraordinary mountains.
The Gamburtsevs are the size of the European Alps and yet they are totally buried beneath the Antarctic ice.
Their discovery in the 1950s was a major surprise. Most people had assumed the rock bed deep within the continent would be flat and featureless.
Survey data now suggests the range first formed over a billion years ago, researchers tell the journal Nature.
The Gamburtsevs are important because they are thought to be the location where the ice sheet we know today initiated its march across Antarctica.
Unravelling the mountains' history will therefore inform climate studies, helping scientists to understand not just past changes on Earth but possible future scenarios as well.
"Surveying these mountains was an incredible challenge, but we succeeded and it's produced a fascinating story," Dr Fausto Ferraccioli from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) told BBC News.
Dr Ferraccioli was a principal investigator on the AGAP (Antarctica's Gamburtsev Province) project.
This multinational effort in 2008/2009 flew aircraft back and forth across the east of the White Continent, mapping the shape of the hidden mountain system using ice-penetrating radar.
Other instruments recorded the local gravitational and magnetic fields, while seismometers were employed to probe the deep Earth.
The AGAP team believes all this data can now be meshed into a credible narrative for the Gamburtsevs' creation and persistence through geological time.
It is a story that starts just over a billion years ago, long before complex life had formed on the planet, when the then continents were drifting together to create a giant landmass known as Rodinia.
The resulting collision pushed up the mountains, and also produced an underlying thick, dense "root" that sat down in the crust.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
ping
Very interesting - have any shoggoths been spotted?
This might be similar to the rejuvenation of the southern Appalachians during the Cenozoic Era.
Hi Nully, it looks as if they are trying to dig ‘em out.
I’ve seen the Gamburtsevs. Great family of acrobats.
You guys are making me Google those wonderful names.
***The Gamburtsevs are the size of the European Alps and yet they are totally buried beneath the Antarctic ice.***
So, Lovecraft’s MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS really do exist!
Holy Cthulhu Bat-manu, not those guys again!
Yeah, but, Jay and Grant want proof, so where’s the EVP’s?
It looks like Lake Vostok sits at the base of these mountains.
If the wind could blow though those mountains they would would talk with ghostly voices but being buried in ice there have been silenced.
bkmk
Ok, when the pyramid shows up, I ain’t goin’! ;-)
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